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So how would you replace that shortfall of $50 billion/year for schools that are, in large part, already over-crowed and under-performing.
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Quit buying expensive toys for shitty teachers. Quit keeping shitty teachers on-line and giving them pensions. Quit keeping shitty teachers in "rubber rooms" on full pay. Quit paying for every school to have Mens and Women's Underwater Basket Weaving. Tell the various school-Sports teams to make like the Marching Band and pay their own way: bake sales, car-washes, etc. Tell the NEA to take their toys and their PC bullshit and their protection of lousy teacher's jobs and fuck off. That sounds like a good start to me.
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You complain about funding schools with the "latest, greatest" equipment and about us failing behind the Chinese and the French all in the same post. Interesting.
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Because while a student of Nuclear Physics might require lessons on a SmartBoard, nobody needs anything beyond slate and chalk to learn that 2+2=4 or to take notes on the Past Participle. When I was overseas teaching, all my work was done on markerboards or (mostly) flip-pads on easels. It worked when I was in grade-school, it worked for teaching English (the most difficult language in the world) to Czech businessmen, and it would work just fine for schools today.
In spite of all the technology, money, and resources we keep throwing at the collectivist brainwash known as Public Education, we have in the space of two generations gone from teaching Latin, Greek, and Trigonometry in High School...to teaching Remedial English in UNIVERSITY. I vividly remember being in my Entro English class during my Freshman year of College, and hearing students amazed and offended to be told that "he done went to the store" or "I done did that homework" or "lemme axe you" were not correct and should not be used in formal settings/writing. Equally vivid are the people who came to me for help writing papers after their Profs nearly bled to death marking them for things like IM-speak or the kind of grammatical SNAFU that I -thought- people learned not to make sometime around 5th Grade. These are not my inbred idiot neighbors, these are University students with scholaships -seriously- wondering what the big deal is about "I done axed you." We have Universities now administering admissions exams which consist of building with Legos and utilizing college-prep COMIC BOOKS because our High School graduates lack the ability to read and write in something resembling English. No wonder Hunter S. Thompson blew his brains out! This in spite of billions of dollars, millions of man-hours, and more well-meaning effort and good faith than anyone would otherwise have known what to do with. Meanwhile, schools in Asia, Europe, and Latin/South American have consistently, with far less money and PC bullshit, made the US Educational system look ridiculous for most of the last 50 years.
"The reason for the Lego test is not what it measures, but what it doesn't: Intelligence, literacy, capacity to analyze, academic achievement, and any faint hope of success in college. It's a dodge."
--Fred Reed